Friday, October 27, 2006

The Connections: Ommatidium — The Eyes Have It (Part II); Time Travel

Lots of responses to the first "Eyes Have It" post—

1. Dizzyhead Jorge recalls:

When I read Angier's review of The Family That Couldn't Sleep, I was reminded of the insomnia epidemic that struck Macondo in OneHundred Years of Solitude. An after-effect of that insomnia was amnesia. To avoid forgetting the names of household objects and farm animals, Macondians had to hang signs around everything. My favorite example, which I'm paraphrasing from memory since I don't have an English-language edition handy, was a sign that said: "This is a cow [Io?]. It has to be milked every morning, to obtain milk, which is used to make coffee with milk."

3. Dizzyhead Brent, re Night Shift: "I found that cover disturbing too, but i think it has more to do with the fact that the hand is the organ of touch and the eyes are the untouchable organ (at least i've always found it hard to do so, and EYE VIOLATION carries a hell of a charge, witness oedipus and CHIEN ANDALOU). also feels like it's involved with the idea of CREASES in the hand OPENING as eyes."

Very true—and this is what makes first-time contact-lens users recoil!

4. Finally, Dizzyhead Jenny writes: "Enderby's Dark Lady, the fourth vol of the Enderby sequence [...] by Anthony Burgess, features a time-travel sequence in which a future guy goes back to Elizabethan England—he thinks it's naturalistic/real, but then everythinggoes awry, and one symptom is the woman he's about to have sex with (can'tremember exact details) has eyes where her nipples should be. Verygrotesque!

5. More later (Part III or even IV) on the eyes-as-nipples motif. For now, we take the time-travel cue and link to Wired's "Very Short Stories" feature, already heavily linked. These are a lot of fun—my favorite might be Alan Moore's

Machine. Unexpectedly I've invented a time

6. Speaking of Wired, the same issue contains a story about Pi director Darren Aronofsky's beleaguered film The Fountain. It supposedly was met with boos at one screening (for critics), and a "ten-minute standing ovation" the next night (at a screening for a regular audience).